The Wily Woodchucks

Meet Pudgy and Charles, two sleepy and thoroughly content woodchucks that live in the countryside. Their neighbors are a kind family whose marvelous garden is bursting with fresh vegetables-just the thing hungry woodchucks love to eat! Each day Pudgy and Charles waddle down the path, crawl through the garden fence, and eat to their hearts' content-beans and sweet corn, carrots and lettuce, and squashes galore. The only problem is, they don't know when to stop, and their gorging is ruining the perfectly plotted garden. The family realizes they're in quite a pickle: how do you keep two greedy woodchucks from eating everything in sight? When fences of every kind don't work, the decisions get more difficult. And all the while, Pudgy and Charles are getting bigger and bigger . . .

Written by the childhood friend and biographer of well-known artist Wanda Gág and richly illustrated by Wanda's younger sister Flavia, The Wily Woodchucks portrays a real-life encounter with hungry woodchucks that the Gág family had in the 1930s at their summer home in New Jersey. With this captivating book, Georgia Travers has given us not just a whimsical tale of summertime mischief but also a charming and revealing episode from the private life of an influential American author and artist.